Karting Hands-Free

September 1, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 3 Comments

Some of us have computer mice with more buttons than we have fingers, resolution tracking finer than a naked eye can discern, and forced-air vents. All these features presuppose one thing; the user has a functioning hand. [Federico Runco] knows that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, will rob a person of their ability to use standard computer inputs, or the joystick on a motorized wheelchair. He is building EyesDrive for the 2020 Hackaday Prize, to restore that mobility to ALS patients. There are already some solutions, but this one focuses on a short bill of materials.

Existing systems are expensive and often track pupil location, which returns precise data, but EyesDrive only discerns, left, right, and resting. For these, we need three non-invasive electrodes, a custom circuit board with amplifiers, signal processing circuits, and a microcontroller. He includes a Bluetooth socket on the custom PCBs, which is the primary communication method. In the video below he steers a virtual kart around a knotty course to prove that his system is up to the task of an urban wheelchair.

EyesDrive by [Federico Runco] should not be confused with the HackadayPrize2015 winner, Eyedrivomatic, lead by two remarkable hackers, Steve Evans and Patrick Joyce.

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Feel The Virtual Road With Force Feedback

November 22, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 7 Comments

When you’re driving your virtual supercar around the Italian countryside the last thing you want is an inauthentic steering wheel feel, that’s where Open FFBoard comes in. Racing game enthusiasts will go to impossible and sometimes incredibly expensive lengths to build extravagant simulators. [Yannick] feels many of these products are just a little too pricey without much need.

Right now his board is still in a process of iteration, though it can integrate with Assetto Corsa already. You can see in the demo video after the break that it responds quite realistically to the video game state, however problems keep cropping up in search of solutions. Motor drivers burn out and power resistors are added: that energy has to go somewhere. Next up will be switching to the increasingly popular Trinamic drivers. Either way we can’t wait to see the next revision and to get another amazing simulator build sent in to us, maybe centered around the Open FFBoard.

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Electric Vehicles On Ice

August 16, 2019 by Sharon Lin 10 Comments

This winter, a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts, including [Dane Kouttron], raced their homemade electric go-karts on the semi-frozen tundra nearby as part of their annual winter tradition. These vehicles are appropriately named Atomic Thing and Doom Sled, and need perfect weather conditions to really put them to the test. You want a glass-like race track but snowfall on ice freezes into an ice-mush intermediate that ends up being too viscous for high-speed ice vehicles. The trick is to watch for temperatures that remain well below zero without snow-like precipitation.

The group is from the community makerspace out of MIT known as MITERS and already have EV hacking experience. They retrofitted their VW Things vehicle (originally built for a high speed electric vehicle competition) to squeeze even more speed out of the design. Starting out with an 8-speed Shimano gearbox and a 7kW motor, they assembled a massive 24S 10P battery out of cylindrical A123 cells salvaged from a Prius A123 Hymotion program. This monster operates at 84V with a 22AH capacity, plenty for power for the team to fully utilize the motor’s potential.

The battery is ratchet strapped to the back of the Atomic Thing to provide more traction on the ice. It must feel just like riding on top of a different kind of rocket.

Original configuration of battery packs

Battery packs ratchet strapped

They tried using ice skates in the front of the Atomic Thing, but the steering was difficult to control over rough ice. Studded solid tires perform quite well, resulting in less jarring movement for the driver. Doom Sled is a contraption built from a frame of welded steel tube and a mountainboard truck with ice skate blades for steering. The motor — a Motenegy DC brush [ME909] — was salvaged from a lab cleanout, transferring power to the wheels through a chain and keyed shaft. The shaft-to-wheel torque was duly translated over two keyed hub adapters.

The crew fitted a seat from a longscooter and made a chain guard from aluminum u-channel to keep the flying chain away from the driver’s fingers. The final user interface includes a right-hand throttle and a left-hand “electric brake” (using resistors to remove the stored energy quickly to combat the enormous inertia produced by the vehicle).

Overall, ice racing was a success! You can see the racing conditions were just about perfect, with minimal ice mush on the lake. Any rough patches were definitely buffered smooth by the end of the day.

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Downloadable 3D Cockpits Enhance FPV Racing

February 17, 2019 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

First Person View (or First Person Video) in RC refers to piloting a remote-controlled vehicle or aircraft via a video link, and while serious racers will mount the camera in whatever way offers the best advantage, it’s always fun to mount the camera where a miniature pilot’s head would be, and therefore obtain a more immersive view of the action. [SupermotoXL] is clearly a fan of this approach, and shared downloadable designs for 3D printed cockpit kits for a few models of RC cars, including a more generic assembly for use with other vehicles. The models provide a dash, steering wheel, and even allow for using a small servo to make the steering wheel’s motions match the actual control signals sent. The whole effect is improved further by adding another servo to allow the viewer to pan the camera around.

Check out the video embedded below to see it in action. There are more videos on the project’s page, and check out the project’s photo gallery for more detailed images of the builds.

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GPS Overlays Give Real Life Racing A Video Game Feel

September 4, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Racing is certainly exciting for the person rocketing around the track fast enough to get the speedometer into the triple digits, and tends to be a decent thrill for the spectators if they’ve got good seats. But if you’re just watching raw race videos on YouTube from the comfort of your office chair it can be a bit difficult to appreciate. There’s a lack of context for the viewer, and it can be hard to get the same sense of speed and position that you’d have if you saw the event first hand.

In an effort to give his father’s racing videos a bit more punch, [DusteD] came up with a clever way of adding video game style overlays to the recordings. The system provides real-time speed, lap times, and even a miniature representation of the track complete with a marker to show where the action is taking place. The end result is that recordings of Dad’s exploits on the track could pass as gameplay footage from Gran Turismo (we know GT doesn’t have motorcycles, but you get the idea).

The first part of the system is the tracker itself, which consists of a GPS receiver, an Arduino Pro Micro, and an SD card module. [DusteD] powers the device with two 18650 cells in parallel, and a DC-DC boost converter to step it up to 5V. Everything is contained in a 3D printed enclosure that he designed in OpenSCAD, with the only external elements being a toggle switch, a momentary switch, and most critically, a set of LEDs.

These LEDs play into the second part of the system, the software. The blinking LEDs are positioned so they’ll get picked up by the camera, which is then used to help synchronize the data stored on the SD card with the video. [DusteD] came up with some software that will take the speed and position information from the card, and turn it into PNG files with transparent backgrounds. These are then placed on top of the video with the help of FFmpeg. It takes a little adjustment to get everything lined up properly, but as the video after the break shows the end result is very impressive.

This build reminds us of the Raspberry Pi powered GPS helmet camera we featured a few years back, and it’s interesting to see how the two projects achieved what’s essentially the same goal in different ways.

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High-Speed Drones Use AI To Spoil The Fun

November 29, 2017 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Some people look forward to the day when robots have taken over all our jobs and given us an economy where we can while our days away on leisure activities. But if your idea of play is drone racing, you may be out of luck if this AI pilot for high-speed racing drones has anything to say about it.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has been working for the past two years to develop the algorithms needed to let high-performance UAVs navigate typical drone racing obstacles, and from the look of the tests in the video below, they’ve made a lot of progress. The system is vision based, with the AI drones equipped with wide-field cameras looking both forward and down. The indoor test course has seemingly random floor tiles scattered around, which we guess provide some kind of waypoints for the drones. A previous video details a little about the architecture, and it seems the drones are doing the computer vision on-board, which we find pretty impressive.

Despite the program being bankrolled by Google, we’re sure no evil will come of this, and that we’ll be in no danger of being chased down by swarms of high-speed flying killbots anytime soon. For now we can take solace in the fact that JPL’s algorithms still can’t beat an elite human pilot like [Ken Loo], who bested the bots overall. But alarmingly, the human did no better than the bots on his first lap, which suggests that once the AI gets a little creativity and intuition like that needed to best a Go champion, [Ken] might need to find another line of work.

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Racing Simulator Built From Scrapheap Finds

November 24, 2017 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Paradise means something different for everyone, it could be a sitting by a fire on a rainy night or lying on a sun-kissed beach. But for us, and makers like [liltreat4you], it’s a well stocked scrap pile out behind the house. After buying a racing wheel and pedals for his Xbox, he took a trip out to his little slice of paradise and found nearly all the hardware he needed to build a professional looking race simulator. According to his breakdown, most of the money he spent on this build ended up going into that sweet red paint job and the speed-enhancing stickers.

Everything the light touches is our kingdom.

Not all of us are as lucky as [liltreat4you], and we probably won’t just happen upon a driver’s seat out of a Mazda, or a bunch of perfectly bent metal pipes from an old trampoline out on the back forty. But trolling Craigslist or cruising around for flea markets can still get you parts like these for cheap, so try not to be too discouraged if your backyard isn’t quite as well stocked.

Once he had the metal pipes and seat from the car, the rest of the build came together pretty quickly. After building an oval out of his salvaged pipes, he attached the seat and the arms that would eventually hold the steering wheel and display. A plate was also added at the bottom for the pedals to sit on. By using long bolts, [liltreat4you] was even able to add a degree of adjustment to the wheel position. Being that he got his seat out of a real car, there’s the usual adjustment you’d expect there as well.

Speaking of which, [liltreat4you] casually mentions that you should disconnect the battery of the donor vehicle before taking out the seat, as it’s possible that the removal of the seat or the disconnection of the seat harness can cause the airbags to deploy. We can neither confirm nor deny this, but it’s probably safe advice to follow.

The purists out there may claim that what [liltreat4you] has put together doesn’t quite meet the definition of simulator in its current form. But with the addition of some instrumentation and just a bit of physical feedback, he’ll be well on his way to the complete driving experience.